Grant has collected some modern onomatopoeia for the technological age. Try untz, for the beat in dance music, or wub, for the common dubstep sound. Pew pew! works for lasers and beep for a computer’s beep is a modern classic. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Modern Onomatopoeia”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
I’ve been working on modern onomatopoeia.
Modern onomatopoeia.
So these are words where we say something that sounds like the thing that it is.
We say splash because it sounds a little like a splash.
We say kerplunk.
If you drop something heavy in the water, it kind of sounds like kerplunk, right?
So what are modern ones?
Well, modern ones, I’ve defined it as onomatopoeia since 1950, and they represent our age, our era.
For example, beep.
A computer’s beep.
That’s a modern otomatopoeia.
Nice.
In dance music, unce, spelled U-N-T-Z or O-O-N-C-E, is an otomatopoeia because it represents the sounds of the beat.
Unce, unce, unce, unce.
Right?
And so that’s how it’s spelled.
And with dubstep, which is a new kind of electronic music, actually not that new, maybe five, ten years old, there’s wub, because some of the sounds in when they drop the bass and they do some crazy stuff and it’s a they kind of ruin the beat.
And it goes wub, wub, wub.
And so it’s wub.
And these are modern automatopeia.
So I put the call out on Twitter just casually to see what other people could come up with.
And a great one was the sound of lasers.
Lasers tend to say pew, pew when we fire lasers, right?
Kind of like the blasters in Star Wars.
Yeah, nice.
A hundred years ago, I don’t know what sound weapons made, but it was probably bang, bang or pow, pow, right?
It wasn’t pew, pew.
Yeah.
Another one of these modern automatopeia is the word yoink.
This came from a listener who responded to my tweet.
Yoink.
This is when you take something away from somebody.
And I’ve been tracking this as a slang word for about 10 years now.
Yoink.
Kind of like Shaggy might say on Scooby-Doo.
I don’t know that it comes from there, but a lot of people will reference that character voiced by Casey Kasem on Scooby-Doo.
Well, sure.
Right?
That’s when you yank something away.
Modern automatopea, a lot of them have to do with phones, for example, or modern electronics, right?
What does a phone do?
It goes bring, bring.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And if you write these down, B-R-R-I-N-G, something like that.
It’s interesting stuff.
I love it.
What are your modern automatopeas?
Send them along, 877-929-9673.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
